A kite? Just one?

How about eight kites!
We saw all these kites from four blocks away, and wondered what event was being held.

Turned out, Mike was a one-man event…and he was flying only about half his kites….just for the fun of it!
He hadn’t just cut these out of newspaper, either. Some had loooong tails with fancy decorations at the end. The one pictured below had rigging at the end of the tail that spun in the wind!
Mike explained the various style tails and various sizes of kites. He wasn’t flying his largest kite that day, because the breeze was too light to support it.
Mike launched them one at a time, then anchored their rolls of line to the ground at various points around the field so they would fly in a spread-out fashion.
As sundown approached, the wind began to diminish and the kites began to fly lower. Their lines actually crossed each other in several instances, so he had to be careful to pull them down in a particular sequence! Mike knew all the tricks, and saved his energy by simply clipping a line to his belt and walking across the field to a tree, walking around the tree, then coming back to where a kite’s line was anchored in the ground…so the kite was pulled down from the sky until it fell to the ground. Mike actually enjoyed seeing one of them dive straight down the final few feet!
It took some time to get them all down and brought over to his pickup, where each one had its frame removed and flying surface & tail rolled up and put into storage boxes. Not to mention rolling up all those lines!
Mike was racing sundown, and kept being interrupted by passersby who saw the kites and came over to inquire. And there was this one pesky photographer!

He made it just in time.